In the early 1990s, a guitar-heavy new musical category set out to conquer the hearts and ears of the audience. A new generation of artists would unleash distorted guitars, angry drums, and bucketloads of attitude onto an audience that was suddenly keen to rock out again.

Influenced by classic rock of the 1960s and ’70s, and in opposition to the synthetic aesthetics of the prior decade, bands like Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains popularized the next incarnation of rock music. Its playbook is still the go-to for guitar-heavy hard rocking styles.

What makes BRUTE special? First and foremost, it has been designed, recorded, and processed to do one thing really well: compete with layered walls of distorted guitars while maintaining character and detail. This was a tricky challenge. The solution was to record with three different sets of microphones that emphasize different aspects of the drum sound.

• Click/Smack: The vintage Sennheiser MD21 from the 1960s emphasizes the attack transients. The source signal was processed with a Manley Voxbox.
• Grit/Dity: Vintage tube and ribbon overhead mics. This is where the character is captured. All the organic noise and resonances that give a warm, coarse, and natural quality.
• Clean/Nice: Modern high-spec Schoeps microphones that capture the sound as is, with as little colorization and distortion as possible, for an expensive and glossy character.

Mix Presets shape the overall sound by swapping out an entire multibus effect chain for every channel under the hood. This saves you time and nerves wrestling with the bus system of your DAW.

• Select Style, tempo, and global preset
• Latch and micro timing options
• Organize Intros, Fills, Endings, and Breakdowns, as well as Verses, Choruses, Specials, and Stops
• Edit individual instruments with custom decay, tune, and reverb amounts
• Choose one of five Drum Kits: Dirty, Noble, Prime, Tight, and Dark
• Select between several mic layouts and mixtures
• Try out one of six Mix Presets: Gentle, Slam, Bite, Crush, Bounce, and Wide

Make your drums stand out. Smack adds purposefully recorded and processed mic signals that focus attacks and transients while retaining the warm and organic qualities of the kit. With Grit, you can crossfade between two sets of mics—from nice and clean to dirty and mean.